The association between municipal fragmentation and suburban sprawl is examined, based on a cross-sectional analysis of all U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents in the 1990s. Results reveal that this association is rather weak but significant and is sustained even when the less fragmented and more compact Canadian metropolitan areas are excluded from the analysis. The impact of residential sprawl on fragmentation is significant, but fragmentation does not predict sprawl. Low levels of fragmentation do not guarantee compact development, but lack of excessive fragmentation might be a precondition for compact development in North America.

This study examines the contemporary development of gated communities in Israel, linking the phenomenon to global trends in privatisation, associated with the rise of neo-liberal landscapes. It is argued that assertions on weakening state intervention and strengthening influence of the market, oversimplify the complex interplay of private developers, public planning institutions and third-sector organisations. Neo-liberal urban governance does not imply the demise of regulation, but rather its changing nature. Although public awareness of gated communities was late to develop in Israel, in part because earlier forms of gating blurred its development, evidence reveals that social and environmental third-sector organisations are important new stakeholders involved in the production of gated spaces through their impact on public policy, balancing the `disciplining' impact of market organisations.

Using 1990 census data, the authors compare 77 immigrant and ethnic groups in the 16 largest metropolitan regions in the United States. They find that the interaction effect of location and ethnicity on ethnic entrepreneurship is evident not only in self-employment rates but also in niche concentrations and niche competition. Their results reveal a distinction between main-stream groups and nonmainstream groups. Compared to mainstream groups, nonmainstream groups are more context resistant. That is, they concentrate in few entrepreneurial niches and display high niche continuity across metropolitan regions. Group competition influences niche concentrations, but an adverse impact on black entrepreneurship is not apparent.

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The study of gated communities and private neighborhoods is of growing importance to the understanding of new residential space production (Low, 2003;McKenzie, 1994;Webster, 2002). However, gates, walls, and enclaves have existed for decades and centuries, being key attributes of segregated societies and fragmented space (Boal, 2002;Marcuse, 1997a;Wu, 2005). In addition to factors of self-defense, particular social groups have enclosed themselves within gates on the basis of tradition and culture. More recently, issues of political ideology, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status have been examined and captured the imagination of the media, and political and academic circles, representing distinct identities, interests, motives, values, and lifestyles.Recent studies of gated communities have challenged the overemphasis of global factorsösuch as surveillance, transnational elites, and the diffusion of an American ready-made prototypeöand of factors held in common as globalösuch as crime, fear of violence, and insecurityöin the analysis of contemporary gating processes. Such factors, although crucial for explanation, are only partial; a complementary perspective that emphasizes historical conditions, sociospatial contexts, local mechanisms, and symbolic meanings is, therefore, crucial for the analysis of gated communities (Blandy, 2006;Crot, 2006;Glasze et al, 2006). However, the local perspective as it has been used so far has been mostly limited either to an evolutionary argument, indicating that contemporary forms of gated communities are extensions of long-established residential trends, or to a discontinuous argument, highlighting early forms of enclosed residential neighborhoods that have been replaced by contemporary fortified consumer spaces. The Israeli case is different. We suggest that multiple factors operate simultaneously to produce various forms of enclosed communities characterized by parallel evolutionary routes. Hence, older forms of gated residential spaces, such as traditional and frontier enclaves, coexist and evolve alongside newer forms of postwelfare market-driven enclaves also referred to as neoliberal enclaves.